In a disk drive, data sectors may be written to a disk in which each data sector is temporarily stored in a write buffer and then written from the write buffer to the disk by a write head. When a power failure occurs in the disk drive, the current data sector in the write buffer may be lost while a write operation is in progress. As a result, a write splice failure may occur in which only a portion of the current data sector is written to the disk before the power failure.
The write splice failure results in a mixed data sector on the disk that includes a portion of the current data sector and a portion of an old data sector previously written to the disk. The write splice may lead to a read failure when the mixed data sector is subsequently read from the disk. As a result of the read failure, various drive quality checkers may declare the disk drive bad.
Accordingly, there is a need for reducing write splice failures.